System Level Simulation and Radio Resource Management for Distributed Antenna Systems with Cognitive Radio and Multi-Cell Cooperation

4th International Conference on Future Generation Communication Technologies (FGCT 2015), Luton, United Kingdom.

The performance of wireless networks will experience a considerable improvement by the use of novel technologies such as distributed antenna systems (DASs), multi-cell cooperation (MCC), and cognitive radio (CR). These solutions have shown considerable gains at the physical-layer (PHY). However, several issues remain open in the system-level evaluation, radio resource management (RRM), and particularly in the design of billing/licensing schemes for this type of system. This paper proposes a system-level simulator (SLS) that will help in addressing these issues. The paper focuses on the description of the modules of a generic SLS that need a modification to cope with the new transmission/economic paradigms. An advanced RRM solution is proposed for a multi-cell DAS with two levels of cooperation: inside the cell (intra-cell) to coordinate the transmission of distributed nodes within the cell, and between cells (inter-cell or MCC) to adapt cell transmissions according to the collected inter-cell interference measurements. The RRM solution blends network and financial metrics using the theory of multiobjective portfolio optimization. The core of the RRM solution is an iterative weighted least squares (WLS) optimization algorithm that aims to schedule in a fair manner as many terminals as possible across all the radio resources of the available frequency bands (licensed and non-licensed), while considering different economic metrics. The RRM algorithm includes joint terminal scheduling, link adaptation, space division multiplexing, spectrum selection, and resource allocation.